Looking for a PDFMonkey alternative? Here's an honest comparison. PDFMonkey is a template-based PDF generation API: you design a template in its dashboard, then send JSON data to fill it, and a Chrome-based engine renders the PDF. Shotmint renders PDFs straight from a URL or the HTML you send, with no stored template, and also does screenshots and Open Graph images, paid per render with no monthly plan.
| Model | Price | Free tier | Unused volume | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PDFMonkey | Monthly or yearly subscription (10% off yearly) | Starter €5/mo for 300 · Pro €15/mo for 3,000 · Pro+ €60/mo for 5,000 · Premium €300/mo for 60,000 (Boost Packs: 1,000 documents for €5; optional pay-as-you-go €0.008 to €0.005 per extra document) | 20 documents/month, no external images, fonts, CSS or JS; 30-day trial with 300 | Monthly quota resets |
| Shotmint | Prepaid credits, no subscription | €5 / 2,000 · €19 / 10,000 · €59 / 50,000 (one-time) | 25 free renders a month, no signup | Never expire |
PDFMonkey prices are in EUR and come from their public pricing page on 21 October 2026. Prices change, so check their current pricing. Shotmint prices are in EUR.
PDFMonkey is built around templates: you keep your document designs in its dashboard, with a live preview, and your app only sends data, so non-developers can edit an invoice layout without a deploy. It also has fillable PDF forms, PDF password protection, shareable PDF permalinks (Pro+ and up), document storage with retention per plan, team collaborators and EU hosting. If you want templates managed outside your codebase, or fillable forms in the PDF, PDFMonkey is the better fit. Its Starter plan (€5 for 300 a month) is also simple for a small, steady volume.
You already build your documents as HTML in your own app (a server-side template, a React page, a report URL), your volume is irregular, or you also need screenshots. 2,000 PDFs a month cost €5 a month on Shotmint (€60 a year) against €15 a month (€180 a year) for PDFMonkey Pro, and at 10,000 a month Shotmint costs about €156 a year against about €600 for Pro plus seven Boost Packs a month. Credits never expire, so a quiet month costs nothing. POST /v1/pdf takes a URL or raw HTML with A3/A4/A5/Letter/Legal/Tabloid, landscape, margins, scale, backgrounds, header and footer templates and page numbers, and one credit covers a PDF of any page count. Failed renders are free, and a free key with 25 renders a month takes one request, with no signup. There is no template editor, document storage or form filling: you send the finished HTML, and you get the PDF bytes back (AES-256 passwords with print/copy/edit limits, text watermarks and PDF/A are supported).
GET /v1/screenshot: PNG, JPEG or WebP screenshots of any URL, with full-page capture, custom viewport, retina scale, a single-element selector, dark mode, transparent backgrounds (omit_background), ad and cookie-banner blocking (block_ads), and hide_selectors.POST /v1/pdf: PDFs from a URL or raw HTML, with format, landscape, margins, backgrounds, header and footer templates, and page numbers.GET /v1/content: the main content of any page or PDF link as Markdown, plain text or clean HTML, with title, author and date, for LLMs and RAG.GET /v1/og: 1200×630 Open Graph cards from a title and subtitle, with signed public URLs you can put straight in an og:image tag.X-Credits-Remaining header.Shotmint is a new, small service. It has small Node and Python SDKs and integration guides, but no enterprise plans, SLA or team accounts yet (measured uptime and render times are public on /status). If you need those, PDFMonkey may suit you better. If you want an API key in 10 seconds and to pay only for what you use, try it.
ScreenshotOne, Urlbox, PDFShift, ApiFlash, PagePixels, ScreenshotAPI.net, HTML/CSS to Image, Microlink, Screenshot Machine, Screenshotlayer, Bannerbear, Placid, Browshot, Restpack, ScrapingBee, DocRaptor, pdflayer, html2pdf.app, Browserless, Doppio, CaptureKit, Pdfcrowd, APITemplate.io, url2png, Firecrawl, CraftMyPDF, IronPDF, SelectPdf, Prince, Aspose.HTML, EvoPdf, PDF.co, CloudConvert, pdfEndpoint, Abstract Screenshot API, GrabzIt. Yearly cost at three volumes: screenshot API pricing and HTML to PDF API pricing.
No signup, no card; the free key refills on the 1st of every month. If you need more, buy credits once: €5 for 2,000, €19 for 10,000, €59 for 50,000. They never expire, and they stack on top of the 25 free renders a month, which every key keeps. From a script, an AI agent, Make or Zapier, POST /v1/keys/free (no body) returns a key as JSON (openapi.json, no-code recipes).